Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

Then the unseen attacker has her again, tugging her toward deep, dark water, while the only one who can save her is sprawled on his back in the sand, oblivious.

“Please help!” Chrissie screams. Her last words before she vanishes from the screen, pulled into the depths.

Good-bye, Chrissie, Tara thinks. I heard you.

But did her auditory cortex activate? Did Tara put out a glimmer of light for poor Chrissie?

She will know soon.

Abby woke before dawn, stiff and aching but rested. Reality crept back, terrible memories of the previous day, and when she sat up, her hand brushed the stock of the SIG Sauer. The touch of the gun removed the last vestiges of hope that this might have been a vivid nightmare.

A nightmare, yes. But not the kind you woke up from.

She rose and stretched, the sound of her popping joints loud in the empty house. Her throat throbbed and there was pressure behind her eyes and under her jaw that promised the arrival of a cold. Hardly a surprise; she’d spent one night bedded down in wet leaves and the next on the wood floor of an empty house. She went into the bathroom and splashed her face with water, then cupped her hands and drank. The water had a mineral taste to it, but that was fine, and the cold of it soothed her throat. She walked back out and stood on the second-floor landing. Moonlight filtered down from above, and she followed it up the stairs and into the third-floor master suite. She sat on the floor there and stared at the shadowed trees as the moonlight gave way to gray and then to rose hues and then the world was back, though it didn’t feel like the world she knew. Abby was alone in a strange house in a strange town, sitting in a bedroom that contained absolutely nothing but a scoped rifle she’d stolen from a murdered friend.

How many hours had it been since she’d grudgingly boarded the train to Boston to meet with Shannon Beckley?

A different lifetime. But she’d been in this situation before, in a way. More than a few times.

The first time she’d flipped a car, it had been in New Hampshire. She’d known her tires were thin, but there were seven laps left and she was sitting in third and although her engine was overmatched by the two cars in front, she was sure she could beat them. She’d gotten outside on turn two and the car in front moved to block her while the leader shifted inside to attack the straightaway, and Abby saw a gap opening like a mistake in a chess game. It was going to be tight, and it was going to test what was left of her tires, but she could do it.

She’d made the cut to the inside and then the back wheels drifted and she knew it was trouble but she tried to ride it out, punching the accelerator, eyes locked on that closing gap. When the contact came from the back of the driver’s side, she wasn’t ready for it. It knocked her car to the right and then the tires were shrieking as they tried to hold on to the asphalt like clawing fingernails. Then she was airborne. And dead.

Or that’s how it had felt. A detached sense of foolishness — You had third, and third was fine — paired with the certainty of death.

The car had flipped twice before it hit the wall, but somehow she was upright when it was done, and people were reaching for her and shouting and a stream of fire extinguisher foam was pounding against her.

She was sitting on the gurney in the back of the ambulance, the doors still open, offering a view of the track, when she thought: This was my last race .

She’d been wrong about that too.

Either you quit or you picked yourself up and moved on. For a long time, Abby’s greatest asset had been her ability to get back behind the wheel after a wreck and feel right at home. You wrecked again; of course you did. You expected death again; of course you did.

But you kept on moving. Up until Luke, she’d always been able to do that.

Up until Luke, she’d also always been alone in the car.

She was alone again now, and there was wreckage behind her, but she knew these feelings. There were similarities between what had happened to her yesterday and what had happened to her on the track; anyone who said otherwise had never flipped a car at 187 miles per hour, never walked out of a cloud of flame.

You survived only when you kept moving. Yesterday, Abby had done that. She’d been all instinct and motion. That had felt right to her. She’d felt more right, in fact, than she had in a long time, which was a damned unsettling realization.

Today she did not feel right. She was frozen and indecisive. Did she call David Meredith to learn what they’d made of the scene, see if she could trust him? Maybe they’d found enough to back up her story already. Maybe she’d slept on the floor in a vacant house for no reason. She needed the internet, but she’d crushed her phone back at the service plaza. She’d have to risk taking the Tahoe out so she could find a Walmart and pick up a burner phone with cash.

“You’re an idiot,” she said aloud, voice echoing off the hardwood floors and empty walls. She shook her head, got to her feet, and went down the steps to the bathroom where she’d stowed the bag of iPhones from Savage Sam. She took them back upstairs, where she figured the signal would be best, sat down in front of a wall outlet, separated the phones and paired them with chargers. Three phones and only two chargers. She plugged two in and waited for them to power on. Only one was protected by a PIN code, but it had no signal, as if it were old and forgotten or maybe its owner had suspended service on it. It would still work if connected to Wi-Fi, though, and the PIN code would be easy enough to defeat; you just reset the phone to factory settings.

One problem there — people were being murdered over whatever was on these phones, and deleting that material didn’t seem wise.

The other phone was functional but had absolutely no personal data. Maybe Savage Sam had wiped it clean in preparation for selling it? Or maybe Oltamu had wiped it clean for other reasons?

She picked up the third phone, and something felt wrong about it immediately. The weight was off. It was in a simple black case with a screen protector, and it looked for all the world like the others, but it was too heavy.

She brought the charger to the base of the phone but couldn’t find the port. She turned it over, looking to see how she’d missed the charging port on a phone that looked like a twin of her own.

It wasn’t there.

An electric tingle rode up her spine.

The top of the phone had a power button that looked standard. When she pressed it, the screen lit up, and the display filled with what appeared to be the factory-setting background of a new iPhone. She hit the home button, expecting to be denied access, but she was greeted with a close-up image of Tara Beckley’s face. Tara was smiling uncertainly, almost warily, into the camera, and behind her was a dark sky broken by a few lights from distant buildings.

Below the photo were the words Access authentication: Enter the name of the individual pictured above.

When Abby tapped the screen, a keyboard appeared. She moved her thumb toward the T on it, then stopped. She wasn’t sure what she was opening here. If this phone actually belonged to Tara Beckley, it was a strange and poor security feature — a selfie asking for your own name? Then there was the question of the weight, which was decidedly different from a standard iPhone’s. She pulled off the case and checked the back and found no Apple logo and no serial number. If it was a phone, it was a clone, a knockoff. But if it wasn’t a phone... what did it do?

It had one hell of a battery, that was for sure. It had been at the salvage yard for a week and had no charging port, and still it ran without trouble. Definitely not the iPhone of Abby’s experience. But it looked like one. Would it act like one? Would it ring?